Of The Hands Thoughts on voluntary poverty, peak oil, homesteading, farming, doing good work, reconnecting to the land, and muddling through a contracting economy

Archive for the ‘zion’ Tag

I’m well overdue for a real post, I know. Yet I’ve been busy. And I also have been uninspired to write anything of depth. Various ideas go fleeting across my brainscape, but lead to nothing. I’ve been gardening, digging in the dirt, loving it. But I can only write that post so many times and I don’t yet have a new angle. Today I planted carrots and beets and lettuce. Yesterday I up-potted tomatoes and seeded a tray of various brassicas, as well as chard and basil. Last night I placed two seed orders. Have mercy. Seeds are a dangerous and glorious thing, these tiny vessels of life.

I’ve had two days off, the weather’s been nice, life has been mostly fine. A few bigger things hover in the background, uncertain potentialities. They’ll just have to stay there for now.

I hoped to write something of substance tonight, but I think I just need to shut the brain off instead. Reading, or maybe watching a show. That’s all I’m good for at the moment.

So I give you the promised second set of photos of the Utah landscape. Forgive my quiet but restless brain, my lack of complex thought relevant to this blog. Give me a few more days. I’ll come up with something. Enjoy these pictures and then get outside and play in the dirt, commune with the birds, watch carefully the clouds in the sky to see what they do, where they go, what they tell you. Put your ear to the ground and listen to the grass grow. Place your toes in the water, any water, ever so gently, and ask them the temperature, don’t doubt their answer. They’re always being honest, even if they change their mind moment to moment. Find a tree. Say hello. Ask the nearest mountain what it’s seen of late, because it’s seen quite a lot. Listen attentively.

Don’t miss a word.

I think I mentioned already that I have a thing for trees against the sky. This one spoke to me, whispered its secrets. Sadly, I’ve forgotten them all. But they were momentous.

These hoodoos, peeking out from behind the trees, lording it over you. It’s just erosion, at the end of the day. They’re not so special. We’ll all erode in time.

Craggy and broken, unnamed. I can’t remember the name of this arch. It said nothing, but still it impresses.

If you were a nearby bird, would you spend all day zipping through these arches? The sky resides there, content to be holed.

Dr. Seuss or phallus? What does it say that those are the two options that come to mind? And does it say it about me or about Theodore Geisel?

So stark a cliff, in such relief, white and light. This is how the sun will bleach your bones, with barely an evocative warning.

I’ve been reading Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire of late. It really is a fantastic book—my first experience with Abbey, who has long been on the intended reading list. It also is making me miss the Utah and Arizona desert landscapes. I have a soft spot for them in my heart, harkening back to the year I spent living in Arizona, from the summer of 1996 to 1997. I fell in love then and continue to love it today.

I thought I would be visiting Arizona again this year, at the beginning of April, but that plan has fallen through. Partly this is good, for a private reason, but it also partly is a shame, as my reading of Desert Solitaire has left me with a strong desire to see the desert again, even if it was to be a different part than the one Abbey is writing about.

I am a blessed person, though, and I have seen the areas that Abbey writes of, though certainly not as he saw them. Back in 2004, I took a long road trip through multiple National Parks, with the bulk of that trip spent in southern Utah, at Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon and Zion. Abbey has evoked memories of that trip multiple times.

In lieu of a visit to the desert—and in need of an update to this blog while I mull a lengthier post to be published, hopefully, by Monday—I place here for your enjoyment a few pictures from the Utah portion of that trip. These pictures don’t begin to do the landscape as much justice as Abbey’s words do, but they evoke my time actually there, within this landscape, amongst these rocks and cliffs and trees, and so they’ll work for now as a small echo of reality.

This is part one. Part two will come later.

The cliffs in Zion really are quite spectacular. I love the clouds in the sky that day, as well.

Mesa Arch in Canyonlands, the landscape stretched forever behind it.

A side shot of Navajo Arch. I find the erosion pattern reminiscent of musculature.

Some of the hoodoos in Bryce Canyon, looming against the sky. I love erosion.

Yet more hoodoos, extending off into the distance.

I just love this tree against the sky. I have a thing for cool trees framed against the sky.